Monday, 19 March 2012

After the presentations in the morning (and some very gooey brownies at lunch), we reconvened for a discussion session, followed by a plenary session reporting on the results of the discussion. Below are the random notes I made during the discussions and the plenary.

On the differences in perceptions between men and women: in chemistry, for women a PhD was viewed as an ordeal, while for men it was a rite of passage.

We should value talent - Beckham doesn't leave football when he's injured, why should a woman leave science when she has a baby?

We need to collect information about where people who leave science actually go to. This point was then expanded to a general one about needing to get some social scientists to look into this whole situation more.

The point was made that attitudes can be changed by legislation (for example the social unacceptability of smoking as a result of the smoking ban) , though the counter example was that people tend to pay selective attention to legislation (for example, the mobile phone ban while driving).

Legal quota systems often aren't fair - for example, when there's a legal requirement to have a 50-50 sex ratio for exam invigilation, and only 20% of the lecturers are one sex, the burden of invigilation falls unfairly hard on them.

Money does talk - if university departments required an award (such as Athena Swan Silver) before they could get a grant, things would change pretty quickly!

Headhunters are often key to pull women up through into boards, and should therefore be worked with. There was a proposal that universities should require headhunters to return equal numbers of male and female candidates for a post. Networks and professional bodies are also useful for women to be part of, as headhunters often go to them to find candidates.

The example of the Chemistry department at the University of York was referenced repeatedly (as you'd expect for them being a trailblazer). They had to move from large quantities of effort to a smaller, higher quality of effort, and the head of department was key to making this work as a guardian of culture.

Regarding self confidence issues, it was acknowledged that actually both sexes need help with self confidence. Women admit their lack of self confidence, while men bluster, but both situations are problematic.

Everyone acknowledged that it was harder for men to say things like "can we start the meeting later? I need to take my kids to school." This shouldn't be the case! One participant said that in her department, the standing rule was no meetings outside of school hours, and that this worked well for everyone.

We need to harness enlightened self-interest to change things.

We also shouldn't shrink the problem - we can't extrapolate out from the local situation to encompass all of science. Yet it's at the local level where the most drive to fix things can be found, and local implementation is important to cover the multiplicity of issues, because there's no one problem across all the sciences.

One delegate raised the question: is the lack of women in academia actually a problem? And if it is, is it not a problem that will be self-correcting once the universities realise? (To me, this sounded like "the market will sort it out" sort of thinking I've come across in my radio days. Unfortunately, when it comes to things like that, the market isn't that helpful.)

Bottom up and top down initiatives need to meet, probably at the level of the Principal Investigator, as they're the ones who train the next generation of scientists and pass on the culture.

Yes, we need more facts and information, but we can't afford to sit on our hands waiting for them - we need to take action as well.

My discussion group came up with the following points (which I managed to scribble down):

Profile problem: people need to be made aware of the leaky pipeline problem.

Acceptance: many people don't even believe the leaky pipe is a problem. Leaders and guardians of culture need to be targeted and trained about unconscious bias.

Positive campaign: pooling best practise and publicising the benefits to all

Role models: (surprisingly to me) the evidence for their usefulness is very weak, and there are both positive and negative results in having role models.

We made the following proposal - that there should be social science research commissioned (by the research councils?) to answer our questions, like how to quantify the value to the economy of fixing the leaky pipe, and then to make publicly available these results and the facts collected as part of the research.

So, in other words, we did what scientists everywhere do - decided that we needed further research! Still, it was a very interesting discussion, and I'm hoping that people went away from the conference that bit more determined to change their departmental culture for the better!

Friday, 16 March 2012

In the midst of this week's haze of grant-proposal writing, I took a day out to attend the "Equality for Women in Science - Sometime, now, NEVER?" conference happening at the International Space Innovation Centre, at Harwell Oxford, as it was conveniently located just across the road from my office. I also went, wearing my hat as chair of the RAL Women in STEM committee. (That's me in the above photo, by the way - taken for a brochure about women scientists in STFC.)

Slightly depressingly, as you'd expect for a conference on equality, it was a female dominated event, with about 12 men in the 100 strong audience. (Coincidentally, that's about the same proportion as women in STEM in STFC). So I had a certain feeling of there being a bit of preaching to the choir going on, but still.

We started with a keynote from John Perkins, Chief Scientific Advisor for BIS. He was really pushing the point that the leaky pipeline damages the UK economy, to the tune of millions, and that we needed to fix it.

We then had Jocelyn Bell-Burnell reporting on a Royal Society of Edinburgh study which is due to be launched on the 4th April, and so we got a sneak preview, which was confidential. She did set the scene quite nicely with some quotes from the Good Wife's Guide, 1955.

Paul Walton (University of York) presented some really interesting stats showing that the ability of women to progress through the system hasn't changed, and this extends across all disciplines. Scarily, if this trend continues, it'll take until 2109 to reach parity in civil engineering, and maybe never in clinical dentistry. The Chemistry department at York are the only department to receive an Athena SWAN gold award, and Paul told us the 12 year story of how they got there. It took a lot of leadership, he said, to change the culture. And they focussed on fairness, which is something everyone can get behind. (He also had a really neat optical illusion trick to make you see a colour photo when it was really black and white - illustrating the prejudices that we all have.)

Ottoline Leyser talked about the pressure cooker of academia - the publish or perish mantra that scares women away, and scares men into staying (because they don't want to seem a wimp), which is bad for everyone. She too was pushing the whole "parenting is a parent's issue" and "it's a culture in science issue, not a women in science issue", which I really agree with!

The last presentation was Denis Bartholomew, who was proposing the use of quotas to get more women on boards and in higher positions of authority. This didn't go down particularly well, for me I felt that he needed more evidence to show to support his thinking, especially when presenting to scientists! Still, he had a good analogy, that smoking only really became socially unacceptable after legislation came into force for the smoking ban.

After lunch we had some really good discussion sessions. Which I will report another time, because it's Friday afternoon, and time for me to go home!

The NERC Science Information Strategy Data Citation and Publication project aims to develop and formalise a method for formally citing and publishing the datasets stored in its environmental data centres. It is believed that this will act as an incentive for scientists, who often invest a great deal of effort in creating datasets, to submit their data to a suitable data repository where it can properly be archived and curated. Data citation and publication will also provide a mechanism for data producers to receive credit for their work, thereby encouraging them to share their data more freely.